


Three Can Keep A Secret

by typhe



Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Family, LHM, M/M, Post-Canon, Survivor Guilt, bereavement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 08:48:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typhe/pseuds/typhe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stefen gets to know Lissa after Vanyel's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Can Keep A Secret

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in connection to a much longer fic that I've never finished. Warning for suicidal ideation.

I've often been handed the role of the Messenger; it's as if everyone decided without asking me that I am the person to call upon when they need someone to go announce a death. I've composed countless black-edged letters and a score of eulogies over the years, and the first of the latter was Vanyel's; I did it because I had to, because in those stone-grey days after I came back to Haven, waiting for his family to gather for the memorial, I couldn't do anything but think and think and think of him, like my grief had eaten the sun, replaced sleep and food and music - Breda sat me down and pretty much ordered me to wring some work out of it for my own damn good and Medren sat near me while I wrote, going over a life set to paper (the only life he still had, words to put in the ground in place of a corpse - so I thought then) and filling in the spots I'd left blank. Delivering it in the Palace temple was one of the hardest things I've ever done - I had to fight through every line and when I was finished I just went back to my seat beside Lissa and wept silently for the rest of the memorial. I still remember how gently she held my arm there. I'd met her for the first time that morning and she supported me like _I_ was her brother.

It felt like half of Haven had crammed themselves into the temple, and most of them were strangers to me, so maybe I set a lasting impression. Maybe I had to. And I've kept on singing to the passing and the dead, sat by Randale and Shavri's and many other deathbeds giving of myself to make those last hours pass gently. When I worked with Healers on the Border they used to say that mine was the last voice many injured soldiers would ever hear.

I'm not the Shadow-Lover, but I'll swear there's people who're convinced that I am. I got used to it, about the same time I got used to hearing rumours of my own death; like people look through my smiles and my belief in them and see sorrows, see someone who's halfway no longer here, and when they need a gentle hand they reach for mine.

 

Gods help me, I'm thinking about Lissa, and that grey late winter twenty years ago.

I knew who Lissa was as soon as I saw her - she seemed like a younger Savil even down to her posture, resolute and confident, yet somehow gentler for all that she stood like a warrior. She was scanning the crowd on tiptoe and I knew she was looking for me. And that this memorial wasn't a euphemism to her and neither was I.

She took my arms and thanked me, and said she'd tell me why later. In the evening, she asked me to accompany her to the gatehouse room she was lodging in for the night; she sat me down in a chair by the fireplace and took a small wooden box out of her packs, and from it she handed me a letter. It was from Vanyel, addressed to her, dated the previous springtime. "This is the first one that mentions you," she explained, and sat quietly by me as I read it, trembling. It did; he'd regaled her with a tale of some courtly woes we'd solved, and said how glad he was to have me around, both as a court functionary and as a friend.

The next had been sent from Forst Reach a couple of months later, and I realised I remembered him writing it - cursing his awkward script as his right arm was still recovering from that wound. It wasn't long, and the first half was about the attack, and his fear that they'd come after her too.

The second half was about me.

Hoping he'd managed to get word her that we were lifebonded before his mother had. Saying how much he wanted her to meet me, that she'd like me, paying me all kinds of compliments. Telling her to listen out for my music in her travels. I put a hand to my face, trying to hold back another wave of tears.

"So I had to thank you," she said, as if it were something she'd first done only moments ago. "Because of you I got to know that my brother was happy for the first time since he was a boy. There were a few more after that," and she pushed the box close to my elbow. "And a lot before. I read through them last week and put them all in order. I've still got a few from when he was in his teens."

"May I read them?" I asked hesitantly.

"You shall keep them," she said firmly. "I want you to know the person Van was to me. He never let many people know him well, and he sent me so many of his thoughts over the years...I think he'd want me to show you who he always was, and - how he changed as time went by." Her face creased. I looked down at the closed box, and dared to touch it. Years I'd never known. I tried not to count the oak-rings on its surface. _Oh gods, and I thought that we'd grow old together._

"If you're sure," I said, "Just promise you'll - you'll let me know if you need them again."

"I promise," she said, and I was so damn sure that she was lying, bless her soul - thoughtlessly giving, like Van had so often been. I started from the beginning, and she answered all my questions so openheartedly that I think we laughed as much as we wept.

I told her I knew Van had kept all hers, but she refused to take them back. She said those were mine now too, and I read them in the days that followed, grateful for the chance to get to know her. I first wrote to her myself a month later.

I was 'having problems' - which was the way Medren preferred to put it, I guess out of determination not to acknowledge how much I wanted to kill myself - and I didn't do more than let off some steam about the horrible situation at Court; we'd lost Vanyel and were about to lose Randale too, and every torrid rant about political instability I heard made me want to crawl in a corner and stay there forever, because I really, really needed to _not_ have to connive about how to hold the world together without them in it. _I loved them_ , in such different ways. I'd followed my heart into the night. I wore a millstone round my neck and couldn't breathe except in words. I couldn't see any colours except white and black. And I thought Lissa would understand and even if she didn't then the blank parchment did.

I saw more of her on the Border in later years, and sometimes in Haven in the supposed lulls between military engagements. I'm still glad that chance allowed me to be there for her when she died - skull fractures don't take their victims gently. Few cavalry ever reach her level of experience, but anyone can get thrown by a frightened horse. I think she'd recognised me as I sat with her and sang, though she hadn't been able to speak.

There was a half-finished letter among her belongings, addressed to me. A few supportive words about my allegedly traitorous attempts to press for peacemaking. I put it with all the others, the last of the set.

One shouldn't feel at fault for surviving, but we all do. We're here.


End file.
